“No,” Rhine told her. “We ran the analysis six separate times. I can say, with a roughly ninety-four percent certainty, that these two ships are part of Batch Twenty-Four-Fifty-D. I can, however, also say – with just over ninety-nine percent certainty – that these two ships are not any of the vessels from that Batch owned by the Míngliàng Security Flotilla.”
Damien glanced from one set of diagrams to the next, and then the next. He trusted Rhine’s analysis, and he could even see it himself if he looked. The two ships fit the Batch profile, but didn’t match any of the ships in that Batch.
“How is that even possible?” he asked.
“It would actually be relatively easy, if not quick,” Amiri said slowly, his bodyguard leaning back and studying the screen. “Back when I was a Hunter, we had to deal with ships changing their emissions signatures – any yard can do it. Matching a specific ship would be almost impossible, but getting into a profile like the one TCNI gives us for each batch? That would be straightforward enough.”
She pursed her lips in thought and looked over at Damien. “Time-consuming, though. You’re manually retuning every engine, every antennae.”
“But any yard could do it,” Damien repeated. “Son of a bitch.”
“If the ships we killed weren’t Míngliàng’s, what happened to their ships?” Jakab asked.
“Someone knew we’d destroyed them,” the Hand said flatly. “So they hunted down a pair of MSF ships on patrol that would match the Batch number, and blew them to hell to make everyone think the MSF attacked us.”
“That’s assigning our theoretical enemy near-omniscience, sir,” Jakab noted. “If there was a third ship, we’d have seen them jump in with the others.”
“Or our enemy could have spies in Sherwood, which I think is more likely.” Damien returned. “Every time I turn around, the arrows keep pointing back to Sherwood.”
“I can’t see them blowing up one of their own frigates,” Christoffsen pointed out. “Not to mention, we have a damn good idea how many destroyers came anywhere near Sherwood. Even if Sherwood could do the modification, we know what happened to their destroyers: they gave them to the Navy to scrap. Their budgets are transparent even for a Protectorate world –-we’d know if Sherwood had a spare squadron of destroyers floating around somewhere.”
“If they have a rogue, I could see that rogue destroying another ship to get closer to the war they seem to be trying to start,” Damien growled. “I just don’t see what they plan to gain out of it. A war between Sherwood and Míngliàng doesn’t benefit anyone, but it could easily tear the entire Protectorate apart!”
“Maybe that’s what they’re after,” Christoffsen murmured. “The Protectorate has enemies, and the shared ownership of Antonius creates one hell of a pressure point. Push hard enough…”
“That’s insane,” Rhine objected. “Without the Protectorate, the Guild falls apart – and our entire civilization goes with it.”
“Insane or not, that’s what could easily happen if we don’t find out just what the hell is going on in the background here,” Damien reminded his people. “Rhine – keep digging. Match the data we have from the MSF against everything Sherwood gave us. If some of those attacks are MSF ships, I want to know. If all of them are launched by ships pretending to be MSF, we at least know Míngliàng isn’t the source of the problem.”
The Commander was opening his mouth to reply when both his and Mage-Captain Jakab’s wrist computers lit up with an emergency alert. Both of them read it and went very, very pale.
“What is it?” Damien demanded.
“A ship just jumped in from Antonius,” Jakab said slowly. “They’re transmitting an emergency beacon with a Navy code addendum.”
The addendum meant a Navy ship had given the ship a message to deliver to any Royal Martian Navy vessels they encountered. It was used for emergency transmissions only and usually had a simple header for ease of prioritization.
“What code, Captain?!”
“It’s a Code Omega, sir,” Jakab finished, his voice shaky. “The Dreams of Liberty has been destroyed.”
#
The captain of the jump freighter Rains at Sunset looked like he hadn’t slept for a week. He was a young, dark-haired man with a Mage medallion at his throat and visible bags under his eyes.
Damien recognized the signs of a Jump Mage who’d pushed himself far too hard, probably hitting six hour jumps repeatedly. His captain aboard the Blue Jay had physically sat him down and stopped him when he’d tried that, but this man was the Captain. He hoped the man’s XO had a spine of titanium.
“Captain, this is Hand Damien Montgomery aboard the RMN cruiser Duke of Magnificence,” he greeted the other man. “We received the Code Omega in your beacon, do you have an update for me?”
Damien settled down to wait for a response. The ship was still thirty light seconds out, several days travel for a civilian ship like the Rains at Sunset. A minute passed, and he could tell the moment his transmission arrived, as the Rains’ captain suddenly straightened and tried to fix his unruly hair.
“My lord Montgomery!” he half-gasped. “I am Captain Erik Vang. I am so glad we found you – Captain Arrow ordered us to find you, ‘no matter what,’ he said. You had to know what happened.”
Vang swallowed, shaking his head as if to clear cobwebs.
“He died saving us, my lord,” he continued. “None of the ships that made it out would have without Captain Arrow. He did everything he could to stop what happened.”
That spiel seemed to exhaust Vang, and he glanced aside checking something over.
“I’m sending you the data package he gave us, as well as our sensor logs,” he almost whispered. “There are other ships on their way. I don’t know if they’re safe.”
Damien leaned forward, focusing on the other man’s eyes though he knew it would be half a minute before the other man heard what he was saying.
“What happened, Captain Vang?” he demanded. “I’ll review the data, but we know nothing.”
A minute ticked by, and Vang nodded slowly.
“The Central Processing Facility was attacked,” he replied. “A warship – I think a Sherwood frigate, but I know Captain Arrow’s download has more data – jumped in and attacked. The Dreams of Liberty tried to save the station, but failed.”
Vang shivered.
“She covered us all the way out to safe jump distance, my lord,” he said. “None of us could have evaded that warship – but Captain Arrow took out every missile they fired straight at us. He forced them to focus their fire on him. He got eleven ships out, Hand Montgomery. Fifteen hundred people.”
But he’d done it by making his attacker take the time to kill him. Arrow might have hoped to bring the frigate in range of his amplifier, but the Code Omega meant he’d failed.
It meant Damien Montgomery had sent Captain John Arrow to his death and the death of his entire crew – and the twenty-five thousand civilians on the Míngliàng Antonius Central Processing Facility had died with them.
“Thank you, Captain Vang,” he said levelly. “We will review the data package from Captain Arrow. If you can provide us all the information on the other ships that escaped, I will see what I can do to guarantee their safety as well.”
“He died for us, my lord,” Vang stated, his transmission passing Damien’s in the space between them. “I’ll never forget that. They died to save us.”
The channel closed, and Damien felt a heavy hand fall on his shoulder. He looked up, finally reregistering the bridge of the Duke around him, and Mage-Captain Jakab standing behind him.
“You did what seemed best, Damien,” Jakab murmured in his ear. “And John Arrow did his duty. What use is the Mage-King’s Protectorate if we do not protect people?”
#
The image of Captain John Arrow filled the conference screen and Damien had no eyes for his subordinates gathered around him as he looked at the man he’d unknowingly sent into an impossible battle.
Arrow stood on the bridge of the Dreams of Liberty, his executive officer behind him hanging onto the ship’s silver simulacrum. The bridge seemed calm and unshaken, but the flashing red alerts on the screens around the captain gave the lie to that calm.
“My Lord Montgomery,” Arrow began. “I hope this message reaches you before the situation grows further out of control. I am forwarding it to all of the freighters currently fleeing the Antonius system, one of them should reach you in time.
“I have failed to protect the Míngliàng space station in this system, but I believe I have succeeded in guarding the freighters out to their jump points. Unfortunately, my vessel has taken critical damage and we are being actively pursued.
“Once this transmission is complete, I intend to close to amplifier range and attempt to destroy the enemy. I am attaching full sensor records from the moment they arrived until completion of this transmission, and hope that the freighters themselves can provide however this story ends.”
Captain Arrow, one of the few non-Mages to ever command a starship of the Royal Martian Navy, winced as a new series of alarms lit up on one of the screens surrounding him, but focused back on the camera.
“The most important piece of information in the attached data is this: the attacking vessel is running a lot of ECM, but it’s not enough to defeat our scanners. We have identified our attackers as the Alan-a-dale. Captain Wayne of the Sherwood Patrol is guilty of mass murder.”
“She’s maneuvering to clear her lasers!” a voice on the recording shouted, and the screen cut suddenly to black.
“That was the end of the recording,” Rhine reported. “Captain Arrow did successfully transmit his full sensor logs.”
“Show me,” Damien ordered. “We’ll need to share all of this with Governor Wong and the MSF, so we may as well know exactly what happened.”
A moment later, the screen faded into a recording of the Dreams’ bridge and a duplicate of the destroyer’s standard tactical plot. In the center was the green triangle of the Dreams of Liberty. At the far edge were a scattering of small icons representing the closest sets of the in-system extractor ships that fuelled Antonius’s value to Míngliàng and Sherwood.
Close by in astronomical terms at a mere five light seconds was the impressive bulk of the Míngliàng Antonius Central Processing Facility. It was made up of prefabricated sections carried to Antonius by freighter and did first and second stage refining on the ore and metals collected by the asteroid mining ships scattered through the belt.
A small city in space, the facility was the heart of Míngliàng’s presence in the system – and at almost exactly the opposite position in the system from the large asteroid Sherwood used to base its own presence. A dozen freighters were scattered along a chain from the nearest ‘flat spot’ in space they could jump in and out of to the station itself.
“Captain Arrow was making his first port visit at the Míngliàng station after arriving in the system,” Rhine noted. “The timing was almost accidental. I don’t think Captain Wayne expected to find the Dreams of Liberty that close to the station.”
It was theoretically possible to jump in and out of far higher gravitational levels than most civilian ships would ever risk. It was hard on the Mage, but a strong Mage would be fine if they got the usual eight hours of rest and an industrial dose of aspirin.
Captain Wayne clearly knew the trick, as the Alan-a-dale burst into existence on the far side of the space station from the Dreams of Liberty and the collection of freighters.
“Hail that ship!” Captain Arrow barked. “Demand an explanation for their presence – and take us to battle stations.”
Much of the sound from the bridge recording had been muted. Damien couldn’t hear the alarms, but he could see the strobing lights and the rush of Arrow’s people to reach their stations.
“No response to our hail, sir,” one of the junior officers replied. “I’ve got a bunch of ECM on the screens, but she’s definitely a Hunter-class frigate.”
“What is Sherwood playing at?” Arrow demanded. “They know they’re not supposed to be here. Record for transm…”
“They’ve opened fire!”
The entire bridge was frozen, and Damien could only imagine the shock running through them as the Alan-a-dale, having closed to barely a million kilometers of the station, launched missiles and opened fire with her battle lasers.
The Central Processing Facility was at its core a giant smelter. It was designed to contain immense heat and force… inside itself. Six-gigawatt lasers slammed into the armored containment vessel where the most intense work was done and ripped it open, scattering super-heated molten metal across the entire structure. More lasers slammed into habitation modules, docking sections, and the handful of pitiful missile defense stations the Facility had.
The station was already dead, coming apart at the seams, when the missiles arrived two minutes later. Sixty one-gigaton warheads flew to clearly pre-programmed positions and detonated, a searing blast of antimatter fire that annihilated any chance for survivors.
“Identify that ship,” Arrow ordered, his voice unnervingly calm. “Vector us to intercept her.”
“Sir, I have to point that she out-masses us six to one,” his XO replied, but the tactical plot showed that the woman was obeying as she spoke.
“Look at her vector, Christine,” the captain told her, in that same calm voice. “She’s going after the freighters. They don’t have the acceleration to escape her. Your objection is noted, but we’re going after her anyway.”
“Wouldn’t plan on anything else,” she confirmed. “Bringing up the missile launchers and setting them for counter-missile mode. RFLAM turrets live and cycling. Charging the main beams and linking them into the anti-missile targeting software.”
Arrow leaned back in his chair. “Take us in,” he ordered.
The tactical display showed the important details now. The Alan-a-dale was pulling ten gravities, chasing after freighters that now pushed their own engines to three gravities – the highest any of them could safely go.
The Dreams of Liberty was pulling fifteen gravities, cutting the angle and charging between the two sets of ships.
“Bogey is firing,” the XO reported. “Sixty missiles, looks like they’re targeting the closest six freighters with ten each.”
“Show the bastard why that won’t play,” Arrow ordered.
“Missiles on the way, lasers tracking.”
The Dreams of Liberty’s Rapid Fire Laser Anti Missile turrets were lighter than those used by Martian cruisers, but she had almost forty of them. Twenty four missiles blasted into space, and laser beams followed as the destroyer pushed hard to cut off the frigate’s salvo.
Defensive countermeasures on missiles were mostly designed to stop defensive fire coming from directly ahead. The frigate’s missiles died in their dozens, and the follow-up salvo suffered the same fate. The Dreams’ missiles were faster and smarter, each of them easily intercepting and destroying a Sherwood missile. Those the missiles missed, the lasers swept up.
Four times, the frigate fired on the freighters she was pursing, and four times Captain Arrow’s ship ripped the missiles to shreds. The frigate wasn’t enough faster than the freighters to bring most of them into energy range – if she needed to kill them all, she needed missiles.
Clearly, Captain Wayne agreed – and the fifth salvo fired at the Dreams of Liberty.
“Handle the amplifier, Christine,” Arrow ordered. “I’ll track lasers and missiles.”
A second salvo blasted into space, and the frigate turned, adjusting her vector to bring her closer to the Dreams. If she took out the destroyer fast enough, she could still take down all of the freighters before they could escape.
“Sir, I’ve got them,” the same junior officer as before shouted. “We know that ship – it’s the Alan-a-dale.”
Damien couldn’t see Arrow’s face in the recording, but he could see the captain shaking his head.
“Why?” he demanded uselessly. “Michael and I went for beers a week ago. Why the hell would he do this?”
Further conversation was cut off as the first salvo entered their engagement range, and Arrow focused on defending his ship. Now that the missiles were aimed at them, they were far harder targets. Only half of his missiles claimed a victim, leaving the rest for lasers and the amplifier.
The Mage-Commander’s magic ripped through space, followed and surrounded by lasers. Missiles died by their dozens, and then they were clear, the entire first salvo destroyed.
“Give me a channel,” Arrow ordered. “Captain Wayne,” he snapped as soon as he had it, “you are firing on a Protectorate warship, and there is no way in hell I’m not getting a message out about this. Stand the hell down, and you might save your whole system from suffering for this.”
The missile salvo closing in was the only answer. This time, the head-on intercepts fared even worse, and over fifty missiles blasted into the inner range. Dozens died to magic and missile defense lasers… but not all of them.
“Zee-plus evasion now,” Arrow ordered, clearly realizing they weren’t going to stop them all.
Emergency thrusters spun the ship ninety degrees, its massive engines laboring to blast it along a course at ninety degrees to its previous. It was almost enough.
One missile blasted past, missing by half a dozen kilometers and easy prey for the lasers once it had passed the destroyer.
The last missile was far enough back to adjust its course to match the Dreams of Liberty’s course change. It barreled directly in at the destroyer – only to be stopped by the XO’s amplified magic… eighty meters from the hull.
Even on the recording, Damien could see the million ton mass of the destroyer lurch as the blast wave washed over them. Emergency alerts flared across the surrounding screens, forming a familiar pattern Damien recognized from the Captain’s initial message.
“We need to send a message,” Arrow told his crew, his voice still, somehow, calm. “Forward all of our sensor logs to all of the freighters. Tell them it has to reach Hand Montgomery – no matter what! I’ll need to record a message to accompany the logs.”
Voice of Mars (Starship's Mage Book 3) Page 19